S-Towns: Stories from Small Towns

After finishing all 7 Chapters of Serial's S-Town , we're craving stories from other small towns that reveal life in all of its complexities.

Our Small Towns playlist is full of stories that still stick with us - made in rural, out-of-the-way places, from the woods of Minnesota to Paris, Texas to the Appalachian foothills, to a Rocky Mountain town in Alberta, Canada.

Two Towns of Jasper

Producers and long-time friends Whitney Dow and Marco Williams (Two Tone Productions) discuss the making of their film Two Towns of Jasper, a documentary about the racially motivated murder of James Byrd, who in 1998 was dragged to his death after being beaten then chained to the back of a pick-up truck in Jasper, Texas.

  • 2004
  • 01:23:16

Tornado Prom

Susan Burton reports on Prom Night 2001 in Hoisington, Kansas, a town of about 3,000. While the seniors danced, a tornado hit the town, destroying about a third of it.

Envision Yourself Being a Free Man

Sylvia Ryerson works with family members of those incarcerated in Virginia supermax prisons to capture the sounds, voices & music of home - to be broadcast directly into the prisons.

Battle Flagging Father

In 2009, Brisbane-based writer and documentarian Hamish Sewell traveled to Alabama to meet his estranged father for the first time in nearly 30 years.

As Black As We Wish to Be

There's a tiny town in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio where, for a century, residents have shared the common bond of identifying as African-American despite the fact that most look white.

X-Town

In the late 1930s, Massachusetts flooded four towns in the central part of the state to create a reservoir for the city of Boston. More than 2,000 people lived in those towns.